


spend all day hunting and circling myself

by monsterq



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: (peripherally) - Freeform, Blood, Dysfunctional Wizards Overflowing with Sexual Baggage, Knifeplay, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Self-Hatred, Sexual Fantasy, Sibling Incest, Suicidal Thoughts, Weird Angsty Porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 15:09:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18552274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterq/pseuds/monsterq
Summary: Lifting the knife again, he trailed its point from my cheekbone down to my jaw, so lightly I gave an involuntary shiver. Then he pressed the flat of the blade to my lips.“Lick it,” he said.Felix gets to thinking about Mildmay and his knife.





	spend all day hunting and circling myself

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in _The Virtu_. Title from Rae Spoon's "We Become Our Own Wolves."
> 
> Me: Not sure I can see Mildmay ever using his knife in bed, even if his partner was really into it  
> Also me: But...but that’s my fetish...  
> Still me: Truly the greatest conundrum of our time

“I certainly wouldn’t want to presume”—the innkeeper’s eyes flicked over me from head to toe, her face a studied mask save for the barest twitch of an eyebrow—“but a bath could be brought up. For a small fee, of course.”

I could have kissed her. Drying, the mud had begun to itch. I’d done my best to clean myself when we’d come across a well, but there was only so much that could be done, and moreover, my wet skin had attracted further dirt. I knew my hair was stiff with it.

Mildmay and Mehitabel had managed to escape unscathed. We’d been walking a road pockmarked with splashes of water from last night’s rain, and I’d allowed my attention to stray. I’d tripped and fallen face-first into a puddle that could more appropriately be called a pool, several feet wide and perhaps six inches deep. The best I could say of the experience was that the others had had the courtesy not to laugh.

“That would be very kind,” I said, flashing the innkeeper my most charming smile. It was unlikely to offset the muck still spattered on my face and coating my clothes, but it certainly couldn’t make things worse.

It transpired that the fee was not so small as she had suggested. However, enough remained of the Gauthys’ payment that I didn’t hesitate in judging it worth the cost. Mildmay and I parted ways with Mehitabel to go to our rooms, and in short order a tub was brought up and filled with steaming water from a procession of buckets. “D’you want me to stay?” Mildmay asked. He looked at my face and then away again. “I mean, will you be okay?”

He was too perceptive; it made me itch more than the dirt did. A memory surfaced, tinged with the colors of madness: Mildmay’s eyes burning on my back as I hugged my knees in a dingy bathtub. I swallowed the familiar wash of humiliation. “I think I can bathe without supervision,” I said acidly, and he flushed and dropped his gaze.

“I’ll be downstairs,” he said shortly, and he left. I thought of the careful way he had helped me out of the puddle, bracing his good leg and offering his strength.

When I was alone, I stripped off my ruined clothes and stepped into the water. Its touch made me shiver, despite the heat. Ever since my drenching, I’d been fighting sense memories. Keeper’s hand on the back of my head. Water flooding into my nose, mouth, lungs. Struggling as my lungs seized and fought to pull in air. Always, always, the dark, bitter smell of the Sim.

The absurdity irritated me. The puddle had been hardly deep enough to wet my shins—or would have been if I’d had the sense to stay upright. One would have to put a great deal of work into drowning in it. But still, as I lowered myself to sit, another wave rolled through me, terror and suffocation and that unshakable metallic odor, and I found myself holding my breath.

I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and focused on the water’s heat. On the silence, except for the quiet splashes of my own movements. On the smooth copper of the tub beneath me.

It wasn’t enough. My mind groped desperately for something stronger and found Mildmay. I saw his absinthe-green eyes, saw him leading me through that buried labyrinth of mikkary and stone, his steady, limping gait as reliable as night.

It helped. I focused on the thought with everything I had: Mildmay. His deep, slow voice. His muscular shoulders. His high cheekbones and the snarl of his mouth. I saw him cataloging his surroundings, his quick, sharp eyes filing every detail away. I saw him playing with his butterfly knife, twirling its blade in a metallic dance too quick to follow, and with a jolt, I realized I was growing hard.

My eyes flew open. Was there nothing I could not debase? Mildmay would never want me. He’d made that abundantly clear, yet here I was, panting after him like a chained dog even as I feared and fled from those who desired me. Wasting time with useless and pitiful yearning.

Mildmay and his knife. Perhaps that was the worst of it. One would think I’d spent enough time on my knees for a hundred lifetimes; certainly I was sufficiently driven to avoid such opportunities. Yet it seemed something in me still craved pain and degradation. Perhaps I was nothing but what Pharaohlight had made me.

I forced my mind to the present. The room, its outdated furnishings and flimsy lock. The dented tub. The dissipating steam.

I smelled the Sim again and flinched so hard that water slopped over the edge, darkening a patch of the towel they’d left neatly folded beside the bath. Reflexively, my mind reached out again for Mildmay, clung to him like a child in the dark.

I was weak. But that was not a revelation. And nobody had to know.

As my eyes slipped closed, my hand drifting up my thigh, I saw again the knife in his long fingers. It darted around his hand in a silver blur, dancing with peril yet never drawing blood. Though his attention was elsewhere, the blade never escaped his control. In its speed it was birdlike, though a lethal bird of polished steel no naturalist would ever catalog—but that bird must be in love with Mildmay, because it wheeled around his fingers in endless loops and reversals, a devotion that could be born only of ardor.

But it was no bird, any more than it was a tool that Mildmay used. In his hand, it  _ was  _ him; it was part of Mildmay himself.

In my mind, my brother met my eyes. He stood, and I saw the grace in his body, even with the lameness of his leg. He stowed his knife. Perhaps I said something—something cruel, something to provoke him—and perhaps this time he snapped. It didn’t matter that he never would. 

This was mine.

 

He stalked toward me like a tiger, and I was too mesmerized to prepare. Before I could blink, a jerk to my legs and a shove to my chest knocked me off my feet, and I was blinking up at him from the floorboards, flat on my back and breathless. He crouched over me, pinning my arms with his knees and pressing down my torso when I struggled to rise. I was trapped, immobile, and I fought more to feel my own helplessness against his strength than to escape.

“This what you want?” Mildmay said, his voice flat and dark with anger, and I bit back the words  _ yes, more, please. _

Instead I licked my dry lips, summoned a cloak of disdain, and said, “If it’s everything you have to give, darling, I suppose I’ll learn to adjust my expectations.”

He growled and yanked his knife once more from his boot. I felt its tip bite the fragile flesh beneath my chin, and instinctively I let my head fall back, gasping.

He shifted on top of me, and I saw the realization in his eyes when he felt my arousal.

“You like this?” he said. He ground against me savagely, the knife still digging into my throat; my bravado shattered. I moaned and tried to buck into the touch, heedless of the danger. He pushed me down again and held me there, immovable as stone. His eyes, too, caught and held mine. I inhaled a shuddering breath and felt that green gaze flood into my very veins.

“You’re easy, ain’t you?” Mildmay didn’t seem to expect a reply, which was lucky, as I didn’t think I could speak if Mélusine herself depended on it. “You don’t give a monk’s left nut that I told you a thousand times I ain’t molly. No, you just want and want.” His grip on the knife shifted, and when he said, “Don’t move a fucking inch,” I could do nothing but obey. Torturously slow, the blade traced the line of my throat as if learning it by memory. It scraped down each ridge of my windpipe, across my Adam’s apple—I didn’t swallow, barely breathed—and came finally to rest in the hollow of my throat between my collarbones. “Good. I guess you can do what you’re told.”

My arousal throbbed so fiercely I felt I might catch fire, only inches from his solid weight across my hips. I felt keenly the fragility of my own body, the barrier of my skin as thin as gauze beneath the knife and my brother’s gaze. I wanted to be touched, needed it. I thought I’d do anything for one stroke of his calloused hand—I’d even grind myself against his thigh if he let me, beg him for it and say thank you—but he’d told me not to move. So I didn’t, even as the urgency swelled, my heart thrumming in my ears. “Mildmay—”

“Yeah?” He lifted the knife away, and I felt the loss of it like a lover. I saw no blood, but the scratches seemed to burn in my mind’s eye.

“Please,” I whispered. 

“Please what?”

All at once a second need eclipsed the first, and words came rushing back to me. “Let me touch you,” I said. “Let me see you—I need to touch you, Mildmay, please—”

“You’re kidding me,” he said flatly. “You think you’re the one who gets to decide what’s gonna happen here?”

“Please,” I said again, desperate, unable to care that I was begging. “I’ll do anything, whatever you want.”

“I know you will.” He evaluated me coolly, and I felt my face go hot. Too aware of every place his body pressed against mine, I was an exposed nerve. I wanted to run and hide; I wanted to map every inch of his body with my mouth. Pinned as I was, I could do neither, only wait as he considered me and his thoughts clicked into place.

“Okay,” he said finally, and my heart thudded. “But you gotta earn it.”

I nodded, almost frantic. When he stood, I nearly whimpered. “Up. On your knees,” he said.

I scrambled into position, and he dragged over a wooden chair and sat in front of me. Lifting the knife again, he trailed its point from my cheekbone down to my jaw, so lightly I gave an involuntary shiver. Then he pressed the flat of the blade to my lips.

“Lick it,” he said.

I could feel myself blushing harder, overheated with arousal and shame and the strange place they mated and fed on one another, like the lovers in a story Mildmay had mentioned once. I parted my lips, feeling the smooth metal of the blade and the barest pressure of the edge. It was warm from Mildmay’s body. 

The first swipe of my tongue was cautious, bringing me the tang of steel. I flattened my tongue and licked from where the blade met the hilt to the keen point, memorizing its shape. Mildmay’s fingers were wrapped loosely around the twin hilt inches from my lips, and I longed to suck them into my mouth, but I wouldn’t. I’d be good.

I could hear my own pulse. Cornered, on my knees, I was defenseless. Mildmay’s eyes were intent on my face, and I curled my tongue around the edge of the knife with the next swipe, flicking over the tip. A drop of blood blossomed, and the taste of metal intensified. Was he growing hard, or was I letting my own longings delude me?

When his left hand cupped the side of my face, thumb smoothing over my cheekbone, I pushed into it desperately. “Mildmay,” I said, but it came out wrong, the blade mangling my speech.

“Shh,” he said. He pressed his thumb into my mouth, and I opened eagerly, curling my tongue around it the way I had around the knife. He withdrew and slipped the blade in to replace him. “Suck.”

I sealed my lips around the hard metal, not caring now if I cut myself. The blade lay flat on my tongue, and I worked it as I would a lover’s body. As I would Mildmay. I laved the knife, curved my tongue around it again, and sucked. Another small laceration opened in my mouth, a nick on the inside of my cheek. I swallowed the burst of copper and sucked harder on the body-hot metal. It was tapered, smooth as glass, perfect against my tongue; the edge was so thin that I almost thought it would melt like sugar. The point tickled the back of my throat. Mildmay’s warm fingers brushed my lips, and somehow it was unbearably intimate. I thought of how easily this knife could kill—no, how easily  _ Mildmay _ could use it to kill. All that danger, that lethal power, lay hot and slick in the cavern of my mouth. I moaned and felt the rasp of his calloused thumb.

I heard him exhale hard, and I looked up at him again. His tongue darted out to wet his lips, pressing at the scar. Every ounce of his attention was on me, as if the world had narrowed to the two of us. Slowly, he dragged the knife out of my mouth. It was wet with saliva; I felt it as he trailed it down my chin, feather light, and my face grew hot once more.

“Good boy,” he said, his voice rough. Another noise escaped me, and this time there was nothing to muffle it. He pulled away and stood. Again the loss ached; I barely kept myself from reaching for him. Without his body, the air was suddenly cold, and I felt more aware than ever of the throbbing between my legs, rude and obvious, as the chill caressed it. Mildmay’s eyes flicked down my body and then back up again.

“I’m gonna strip,” he said, swinging his knife closed and setting it on a table, and my heart renewed its clamor. “You touch me when I say you can. Okay?”

I nodded quickly. I’d seen him unclothed before, more than once, but this was different, and I couldn’t look away for a moment as he removed his coat, waistcoat, and shirt, folded them, and set them aside—I suspected out of nerves more than fastidiousness. I stared unabashed at his stocky, muscled frame, the graceful lines of his body, the span of freckles over his shoulder; he blushed at my gaze even before he moved on to his trousers. And I learned I hadn’t been deluding myself after all.

When he was naked, he looked back at me, a hint of uncertainty in the set of his shoulders. I saw when his jaw firmed again. He picked up the knife and pointed with it, the blade still hidden in its hilt. “C’mere. And take off your shirt.”

I almost tripped in my haste. When I was standing before him, half-naked and still staring—strands of hair had pulled free from his braid, falling into his face, and shadows smudged his collarbones and the cut of his hips—he looked up at me. He flicked his knife open, closed, open once more. I knew I’d never again be able to hear that whispering sound, the singing click of metal against metal as it cleaved the air, without growing hard.

“Here’s the rule,” he said. “I’m gonna touch you with this”—he gestured with the knife—“and that’s where you can touch me. Nowhere else, not till I do it again. Got it?”

“Yes,” I said, too fast, my voice more breath than sound. I was keenly aware of my body, his, and the air that intruded between us.

The knife hesitated a bare fraction of a second. Then it moved, quick and agile, and a stinging, shallow cut opened just beneath my collarbone. I heard myself cry out. The sensation broke over me like a wave, and greedily I drank it down, lost for a moment in the dizzy pleasure of taking what he gave me.

He watched me steadily, and I remembered, another wave cresting: it was my turn.

My hand came up as if powered by the jolt of pain. It tingled with energy, with anticipation. I rested it flat on his chest, and beneath my palm I felt the racing of his heart. Softly, I stroked a thumb along the path of his clavicle, memorizing the smooth, warm skin. His eyes flicked between my face and my hand. It occurred to me that he hadn’t defined the word  _ touch _ .

I ducked my head, bent, and used my tongue to chase the shadows in the hollow of his collarbone.

I felt him gasp. “Felix—”

Reluctantly, I pulled my mouth away and straightened. “Is that against the rules?”

He stared at me. Rather than answer, he brought the knife between us and scraped it, angled almost flat against my body, from halfway down my ribcage to my hip. This time he didn’t break the skin. The knife’s bright surface cast a sliver of light above the hollow it pressed into my flesh.

I put my hand on his waist and felt him shiver. Slowly, I slid it up to his ribs, where the bones that guarded his heart and lungs were cloaked with muscle. He was so solid. Maybe even solid enough to hold me in one place.

He looked at me with a challenge in his eyes and lifted his hand. The blade nicked the upper edge of my nipple, and I drew in a quick breath, my arousal responding as if squeezed. The knife slid down, tugging at the peak—the kick of fear tasted little different than lust—and lifted gleaming from the bottom, having drawn no blood. I could still feel its touch when he pulled away.

I took a step closer to him; we were barely inches apart. I could feel the heat mingling between our bodies. My hand shook when I lifted it, but I stilled the quaver and traced a circle around his nipple with my thumb, then swiped across it and felt him twitch. His face was still stone, but his breath quickened as I repeated the motion.

I bent to sweep my tongue across it, take the point into my mouth and suck, and was rewarded when his hands grasped my shoulders like claws. “Kethe—” I nipped at the sensitive flesh just to feel him jerk again, then soothed it with a final lick before drawing my mouth away and straightening.

He stared at me. His face was stained pink, but he held my gaze, and I looked back. He reached up, a slight dent between his brows, and I held still as the knife curved across my face again, cheekbone to ear, almost a caress.

Then he shook his head. “No, that wasn’t—” He was frozen for a moment, and then he lowered the blade, eyes following its path. Down my torso, down below my waist. There was one more hesitation before its sharp tip flicked against the jut in my trousers. Through my clothes, I felt the line scored across my aching sex by Mildmay’s knife, Mildmay’s hand, and I almost came in that single moment. Instead, I dropped to my knees.

“Sacred bleeding fuck,” he whispered, but I didn’t think he was talking to me. He was hard, heavy and flushed before my face, but I turned my head and pressed a kiss to the groove of his hip, my tongue darting out to taste the sweat. He rocked forward. I heard the knife clack shut above my head, and when he cupped my face in his palm, he still held the hilt. It was hard and smooth against my skin and and warm with both our bodies.

I took him into my mouth. He didn’t push me but let me guide the pace, and I did, savoring the weight on my tongue, silky and warm. The musky smell of him surrounded me, and his salty tang filled my mouth. My hands came up to his thighs; I felt them flex and shiver as I mouthed the head and then took him deeper. Something ached inside me. My brother was within me and surrounding me, and all I wanted was more. I wanted to swallow him whole, to  _ be  _ swallowed.  _ Mildmay. _

Curling my tongue across his length, I felt him shiver again. On the next pass, he moaned. I looked up. He was staring down at me, his mouth open as he fought for air, and his pupils were so dilated that the green was dark as pine.

I pulled off for a moment, and he stroked my hair with his free hand. The touch was so gentle that I flinched. “Felix,” he said, the smooth handle of the knife still against my cheek, and for once his face was open, showing me everything—

 

No.

I couldn’t…I wasn’t…

No.

I was sitting on the wooden chair, and Mildmay was pacing around me. He was dressed; I was not, still achingly aroused and untouched. The knife, bright and hard, was open in his hand. “You move, I’ll make you regret it,” he said from behind me.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I didn’t move, save for the rapid heaving of my chest, even when his hand came over my shoulder to trap me against the chair. The knife bit into my skin. Inch by inch, he drew it across, splitting me open like fruit in a shallow arc. The pain came an instant later. It saturated me, consuming all thought, a better high than phoenix. Glistening blood welled along the channel.

He circled back into my field of vision and cut me again, an inch below the first wound, again the path of a surging wave. This time my mouth dropped open, and I squeezed my eyes shut to better feel the sting. I knew Mildmay could see me harden further; it only intensified my body’s response.

“Look at me,” he said.

I obeyed. His fingers dipped into the slits, igniting new sparks of pleasure-pain and  smearing my blood across my skin. Then he brought his fingers to my face. “Taste it,” he said.

I opened my mouth, and he slipped his bloody fingers inside. Eagerly, I licked off the slick taste of copper, of myself, freed from my body by my brother’s hand. Now it was inside me again, and him with it, and I didn’t want to let go. I could feel the scarring on his knuckles, followed its contours with my tongue.

Too soon, he pulled free. I heard myself make a noise of protest, and he laid the knife flat against my lips as if hushing me. Then it was gone, and he kept circling. I didn’t see it coming this time when he sliced into me, a long, shallow line across my shoulder, and I cried out. The wound blazed in my mind. Back in my field of vision, he continued the incision, carving me open from clavicle to sternum, and I trembled with the effort to keep still.

My skin was alight with sensation—where he was touching me, where he was not, and where he had marked me, his touch made permanent. If he kept going, I thought dizzily, I might become merely a canvas of his touch, a map of contact between our bodies. I could think of nothing sweeter.

Mildmay bent and ducked his head, and this time I did move, thrashing as I felt his tongue drag across my cuts. “Mildmay, Mildmay—” There were no other words in the universe. There never had been.

He looked at me again, and there was blood on his lips, my blood. I whimpered. “Told you to stay still,” he said, his voice level. He swiped his tongue around his mouth, but traces remained.

I wanted to apologize. I wanted to beg for his forgiveness. I wanted to kiss him, taste myself in his mouth, feel the intimate irregularity of his scar against my lips.

I did none of those things. Instead, as if cracked open, I said, “Please, Mildmay, deeper—I need—”

His brows twitched up a hair. “Deeper?” His drawling voice mocked my inflection. “What, like this?” He dug his knife in hard this time, and I cried out with the sweet flare of pain. “Nah, that ain’t enough for you, is it?”

I couldn’t respond. He ground his fingers into the gash.  _ “Is it?” _

I tried to take a breath, tried to find an answer, but both were beyond my reach. “I don’t—I don’t know—” Was I crying? Sensation and need had seared everything away but the present.

“Shh.” He stroked my face with bloody fingers, and I closed my eyes. “I know you don’t. It’s okay.” Helplessly, blindly, I turned into his touch.

When steel touched my throat, my eyes flew open again. With infinite care, Mildmay used the knife to caress the delicate skin beneath my jaw from ear to chin. My throat tingled as the point dragged across it. “I could cut you here,” he said. “It’s one of them places. You cut someone here, cut ’em deep, you’re not fucking around. Maybe that’s what you’re looking for. For me to stop holding back. Give you everything.”

I moaned and tipped my head back, baring my throat. But he trailed the knife down to my shoulder, then my arm.

“Here’s another one,” he said. He skimmed down the inner curve of my bicep to the inside of my elbow, following the blade with his calloused fingers. “And here.” My inner forearm. The knife mapped out my veins, my arteries, leaving ghostly scratches across the winding colors of my tattoos. Wherever it touched, I could feel my pulse thudding against the thin layer of my skin.

I was trembling now, and I didn’t know if it was fear or arousal or sheer overwhelmed emotion. But I didn’t want him to stop.

He stepped closer. “Lot of people forget this one, but they’re stupid to.” The knife wandered down my torso, ribs to navel to hips, and kept going. My sex jerked, only inches from his fingers, but he ignored it. Mildmay slid the knife down the crease of my groin, so exquisitely sensitive that I fought not to writhe beneath his touch. “Not the most convenient in a fight, ’less you get lucky, but not everything’s a fight.”

“Mildmay,” I whispered.

His leg pressed between my knees, urging my thighs apart. Exposed, Mildmay standing immovable between my legs, I could hardly remember to breathe as he skated the knife down my inner thigh. “Here, you gotta go more’n an inch deep to get anywhere. Course, you’re skinny as fuck, so maybe it’d be less. But still. Might be deep enough for you.” He paused. His presence filled every one of my senses. “You’d bleed out slower. Slower than from your neck, I mean. It’d take a bit. But maybe that’s what you want.”

“Please,” I said, and I didn’t know what I was begging for. My thighs tensed, trying of their own accord to close and protect me, but they could not. Overwhelmed, burning with need, I teetered on the edge of a precipice. Mildmay was holding me there, an inch from falling to the abyss below.

He looked at me then. His eyes were polished jade. Lifting the knife from my skin—I whimpered at its loss—he flipped it between his fingers. It glinted. “Please what?”

Again, my erection jerked, and looking down my body, I could see clear fluid bleed from its tip. Mildmay looked down too. Slowly, he touched the tip of the knife to its root, then drew it up along the vein, all its keen menace compressed to a single point on my body. I gripped the arms of the chair to keep from jerking forward to protect myself as it flicked against the crown. The sensation thrummed through me like a plucked string.

Laying the cool side of the blade flat against the head, he dragged it through the fluid, and I choked off another moan.

“Please what?” he asked again. Idly, the silver blade danced over my shaft, scratching the tender flesh in one moment and soothing over the sting with the flat in the next. My muscles twitched and jumped, my thighs clenching once more around him; my breath came in shallow pants. At any moment, the knife might twist and bite into me, and I’d have no hope of stopping it. I didn’t even know if I’d try.

I could focus on nothing but the sensation, the intimate peril, my body in my brother’s hands—but I had to answer. His eyes drew words from me, my voice hoarse and desperate. “Anything. You. Just give me, give me…”

“I’ve got you.” His braided hair fell over his shoulder as he lowered himself to drop a kiss to the groove of my thigh, where his blade had searched out my hammering pulse. Just as his hand folded around my cock and gave it a full, firm stroke, root to tip, and I convulsed, his other hand flashed out. Mildmay’s knife slit me open with a deep, straight slice to the pale flesh of my inner thigh. 

Blood flowered as my mind went white with pain. My ears roared. Something in me more than blood, some terrible pressure, flooded from my body to leave me clean and empty, and blindly I reached out and found my brother’s hand.

 

With a strangled shout, I curled over and came into the cooling water of my bath.

 

An hour later, I heard Mildmay’s lopsided gait approach the door. I had long since finished washing myself and dressed in clean clothing, and the maids had come to take the bath away. Now I sat by the window with a book that I’d found abandoned in the wardrobe. Its subject was local wildlife. I’d been trying to read, to occupy my mind with anything other than its recent activities, but in truth I was spending more time staring out the window, watching the stars as one by one they punctured the indigo expanse of the sky. Every few minutes, a memory rocked me, as vivid as if I had truly experienced it. Spells, I thought, were made real by the truth of the symbols they comprised. Perhaps a similar principle applied here.

I should be the last person in the world to be shaken by sex, especially that which had not in fact occurred—or by the perversity of the human mind. Yet my equilibrium was difficult to recapture.

I supposed I ought to be grateful I was no longer thinking of the Sim.

Mildmay entered, closing the door behind him. He set a dish on the table, and I smelled stewed meat. “Brought you dinner. Miss Parr said see you in the morning.”

I nodded, knowing I should acknowledge the favor but unable to open my mouth. My hand had tightened on my book, and I prayed to all the gods I’d ever heard of that I wouldn’t blush. If he started playing with his knife, I thought I might flee screaming into the night like the madman I had so recently been. When he had some distance from the table, I fetched the dish and brought it back to my chair.

He gave me a wary glance over his shoulder as I ate. “You okay?”

“Fine,” I said. To my relief, my voice was level. However, it was also cold. Mildmay didn’t speak to me again as he prepared for bed.

After the food was gone, I lingered by the window for as long as I could. The white moon came into view, slung half-eaten on its back. Each time I moved, I expected the sting of healing wounds.

Finally, Mildmay said, “You coming?”

He wanted to put out the candle. He could have done so without asking, as I could always call witchlights, but he was waiting for me. “Yes,” I said. “Just a moment.”

I undressed for bed as quickly as possible. When I slipped under the covers beside him, he snuffed out the light, and I listened to his breathing in the dark. The foot of space between us felt both infinite and infinitesimal. I was afraid to move for fear that I would touch him, afraid to fall asleep for fear that, unconscious, I would violate him. It had never happened before, but I couldn’t believe it was impossible. I would know what I truly was then. And he would leave.

Or, perhaps worse, he wouldn’t.

I lay awake as Mildmay’s breath slowed into sleep. By the trickle of moonlight from the window, I could make out the soft fall of his hair, his bowed shoulders, his scar.

I wanted to kiss him. I couldn’t hide from that truth. I ached to know what that scar would feel like against my lips, to know how he would kiss me back, in some other world where he wanted me the way I did him—a world that could exist only in my thoughts.

But I wouldn’t think about it. I’d taken enough from him.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr at [monsterquill](http://monsterquill.tumblr.com). Come say hi!


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